DNG - anyone using it instead of RAW?

Been reading the excellent book "The DAM Book, Digital Asset
Management for Photographers" by Peter Krogh. He pretty strongly
supports Adobe's DNG format over RAW files, although he's not
bagging RAW, just putting a good case forward for DNG.

If you don't want to read the book, there is much of it at this
website and while it's a bit of a read, in this day and age I
think it's important to at least skim through and have a basic
understanding:

http://www.dpbestflow.org/

I'm wondering what your thoughts are? Anyone here using it?

I am using Lightroom pretty heavily these days and plan to
continue with it for a long time. It does much/most of the
PIEWare functions, I love working non-destructively with the
RAW files. Just not sure if I should convert everything to DNG.
I like the potential to have everything in the same file, no
sidecar files etc. Also like the lossless compression, disk
space saving possibilities. Don't know if I could completely do
away with the RAW files and was thinking about including them in
the DNG so they could be retrieved if wanted/needed. But that
kinda negates the space saving feature.

 

I shoot Nikon, so my RAW images are .NEF files. They are converted in
Bridge to .DNG files when uploaded. They are still a RAW image
format.

 

I've been using DNG exclusively since DNG came out and discard the raw.
It does save space. I convert to DNG while loading from the card in
Bridge. This allows re-naming, tagging a bit of other data while
converting. So the raw is never stored on the computer at all. Once I
delete the files on the card it's gone (well, I could do a card recovery
at that point).

Raw files from my camera are about 33 MB. With DNG they are 16 - 18 MB.
There are no sidecars. If I ever get a MacAir with SSD or an iPad for
travel, then compressing to DNG will save needed space for all the
photos taken (not there yet).

If you include the raw as-is in the DNG, then you have no space savings
- on the contrary, depending how it's set up, could really use a lot
more space.

For either Canon or Nikon there is a downside, perhaps, in losing some
of the "shot time" information when converting to DNG and discarding the
raw. I don't recall the particulars, but you may want to check that out
before committing to DNG.

 

DNG is an in camera option for the RAW output of my Pentax K20D, and the
only RAW format of my Samsung GX10. However, my main chosen RAW
conversion software, Bibble 5, considers them to be different, probably
because of the differing luminance curves.

 

DNG _is_ RAW. It's just a camera-mfr-independent file format for holding the
raw data.

I used DNG briefly while waiting for LR to add support for a new camera I
had. Adobe can provide updates to their free DNG converter faster than they
can update LR. But that's only an issue for folks trying to become road kill
in the early adopter fast lane.

The problem that DNG claims to solve is that many years from now, the
raw-conversion software you want to use might not support your particular
camera's RAW format.

The problem that DNG causes is that if you want to try a different raw
converter, it may not support DNG, so you'll be unhappy if you don't have
your original files.

I like Lightroom. A lot. But people keep claiming that such and such a
program does a better job. With Canon, there are a lot of (vocal<g>) fans of
Canon's raw converter, which has one of the worst UIs in the history of the
peecee. Then there's Silkypix, Phase One, and DxO. Lots of choices. Dunno
how many of them support DNG, or will continue to 20 years from now.

You must not be using Canon<g>.

 

I think Canon's UI is klunky but OK.

What is not OK is its treatment of highlights. Highlights that
are not blown and look fine when I use Photoshop to read the raw
file often look terrible when using Canon's DPP. On the flip
side, DPP's lateral chromatic correction UI is better.

What I do is look at the file (saved as raw) in Canon's
ZoomBrowser, and decide whether I want to use DPP or Photoshop.
The good news is that with raw, I can change my mind
with no loss.

Doug McDonald

 

* tony cooper wrote :

Thanks mate.

 

* Alan Browne wrote :

Yeah, that's kinda what's making me a bit tentative at the
moment. Losing the actual camera-captured RAW file. Kinda
putting your eggs in one basket hoping that DNG will be around
forever and always supported etc.

In some ways, I think it's a safe bet. Adobe has the market with
Photoshop, and more recently everyone has followed suit adopting
PDF. So in many ways, I think DNG will win out and become a bit
of a standard.

But by the same token, I'm worried about losing the actual data
my camera collected. Canon's CR2 format is best known by Canon,
Adobe has just reverse-engineered the files to read and convert
them.

Yes, see my above hesitations on completely losing the CR2 files.

Thanks Alan.

 

That klunky is pretty horrific given how nice LR is.

Yes.

I haven't used a recent version of DPP, but there used to not be an
equivalent to LR's "Exposure" slider, which allows you to convert different
"windows" into the raw data. DPP used to have a "linear conversion" thing
that would get the whole range (no blown highlights that weren't blown in
raw, no crushed black not crushed in raw, and extreme low contrast).

OK. I've been happy with CA correction in LR: it does what I need and does
it well. But I've moved to lenses that don't have much CA (Zeiss 21/2.8,
Canon 24 TSE II), so I just need a touch of CA adjustment some of the time.
I have a Sigma 20/1.8 lying around here somewhere that desperately needs
help with CA reduction...

Yep. I'm more worried about maybe wanting to work with one of the others.
I'm not sure I'm happy with sharpening in the latest version of LR: it tends
to aggravate noise sooner than I'd expect. I tend to oversharpen, since I
like textures brought out more than is perhaps reasonable, and I'd like a
very different sharpening algorithm: one that doesn't touch the high
contrast edges and only sharpens surfaces. But doesn't sharpen noise.

 

* David J. Littleboy wrote :

In some ways, yes. But it's actually more than that. It's more
of a RAW file container, because it can contain RAW data but also
the sidecar information from editing, multiple previews etc as
well.

I think I'll be sticking with LR for quite some time. Finding
I'm getting better at editing less because it's right in-camera
more these days. I rarely use PhotoShop now, just for the very
intensive astrophotography processing. If I need to edit an
image in PS these days, it's probably because I really stuffed it
at image capture time and I'll likely not really be happy with
the shot anyway. What a snob, eh?

I am using Canon.

 

I do not use DNG, but landscape photographers like Marc Muench use it
almost exclusively. Marc reasons that the camera manufacturers' raw
formats are constantly changing with the introduction of each new model
of camera. How long will the manufacturers or anyone else support these
old formats? Ten years down the road, your camera raw files might be
unreadable.

My own thought on this is that I don't know how long Adobe is going to
be around, either. Ten years down the road my DNG files might be just
as obsolete as any other raw files.

And yes, it is "raw," not "RAW." "RAW" is not an abbreviation for anything.

 

I share your enthusiasm for non-destructive working with RAW files,
but I'm using Nikon NX2 for this purpose. The only problem I encounter
is that NX2 is not what you might call a full capability editor. I can
only deal with this by converting the edited image to a TIFF to enable
further editing in other applications.

Regards,

Eric Stevens

 

Dcraw.

 

Most newer cameras nowadays save RAW in a (losslessly) compressed
format, so there are no space savings anymore. Actually this RAW
compression has been going on for a while. Perhaps you have an old
camera.

 

I'm not using it, because there is no reason to use it. I have the
option however to convert everything one day to DNG, should there be a
need to do so (which at the moment I do not see).

Having the RAW conversion settings saved to the DNG file is pointless,
because if you edit the images at a later point and want to back them
up, you can't just save only the settings - you must save that huge
multi-MB DNG file. A bit messy if you use optical media for backup.

In addition, who knows if interesting camera data gets lost during DNG
conversion.

 

* Eric Stevens wrote :

Same with LR. It does nearly everything I want, but if you need
layer masks, or stitching panos, or HDR (not that I do HDR,
shudder, but I assume it's getting common and others do use it),
you need to export to PS or some other external application with
a 16 bit TIFF is the best way.

 

* C J Campbell wrote :

Yes, those seem to be the 2 big for and against dilemmas, which
is what's making it hard for me to commit to one or the other.
I've had 3 Canon bodies over the last 6 or so years, and IIRC the
raw file format has been the same in all.

As I mentioned in another post in this thread, I think both Canon
and Adobe will be around for a long time, or at least their
influence and market is widespread enough that going either way
will be pretty safe to assume there will be support for both
Canon's raw files and DNG is open-source so development can
continue without Adobe.

I think I'm just going to flip a coin, but it'll probably end up
DNG side up

Perhaps you're correct. Thanks for pointing that out. I'm sure
I've read it written "RAW" enough times I hadn't really thought
about what's right and wrong.

BTW it's "raw", not "raw,", and "RAW", not "RAW.".

 

....AP style is "raw," guy named Strunk wrote the book...

cg

 

I've been using LR since the beta of v 1, and when I was shooting a lot,
I'd convert to DNG only when the final edits were done. This was so I
could readily tell by file type the status of any given shoot. The space
savings was approximately 18% by converting to DNG; no where near the
savings Alan indicated.

The only drawback I found was that at the extremes of color temp, the
Canon software did a better job on some images. Thus, by keeping them in
RAW until finished, I preserved that capability.

I'm pretty sure both Canon and Adobe will be around for a very long
time, so I feel safe with either format, a touch safer with the DNGs.
(There's also a list of cameras that output DNG natively, but Nikon and
Canon aren't among them.)

 

Holy Cow! "RAW" is the preferred style. Doesn't matter if it's not an
acronym, FWIW.